Bill Werber Was First of Duke's Two-Sports Stars
Duke’s first truly great player, Bill Werber, enrolled in 1926, and he discovered a far less pristine setting than he expected. Duke was building its west campus, and Werber found the railroad tracks right through what would be the main quad, all the mud and noise in the morning when he trudged off the class almost too much to take. “Duke in September of 1926 was a sorry looking place,” said Werber, who had been a three-sport star at McKinley High School in Washington, D.C. “I about decided to pack up and go home.”
Werber stayed and became the first of three Duke basketball players who would go on to fame as Major Leaguers — Werber with the Yankees, classmate Henry Kistler with the Reds and, 25 years later, Dick Groat with the Pirates.
...And Duke's First All American.
Buckheit lasted four years with a losing record at Duke, which had become the 23rd member of the massive Southern Conference in 1928. Desperate to keep pace with Carolina, the school tabbed its bright young freshman football coach Eddie Cameron, 26 at the time, to lead the basketball program. In his first game against UNC Cameron snapped the long losing streak, much like Frank McGuire would establish himself as a hero in Chapel Hill in 1952 when he stopped a 15-game skid against N.C. State.
Eddie Cameron Came to Duke As A Football Coach But Took Over Basketball Team To Try to Beat UNC
Cameron’s first great Duke team was his second in 1930, which coincided with the completion of plush West Campus in 1928 and a new playing court (that would be renamed Card Gym 30 years later). Along with his high school teammate Harry “Chalky” Councilor and Duke’s biggest player to date, 6-4 Joe Croson (supposedly recruited by Werber and Councilor behind Cameron’s back), the Blue Devils were finally ready to challenge Carolina for supremacy on Tobacco Road when they defeated the Tar Heels again in the quarterfinals of the Southern Conference tournament.
Duke Gymnasium Opened with New West Campus And was Later Named For First Coach "Cap" Card
Werber made All-American his senior year when he led the Devils to an 18-2 record and their first season sweep of Carolina, including an astounding 22-point victory in the Tin Can. Duke’s 15th straight win that season came in its first-ever game with Kentucky in the semifinals of the Southern Conference tournament.
Despite losing to Alabama in the championship game, Werber and Roland “Bo” Farley had already received some notice as the best backcourt in the country when they engineered an upset of No. 1-ranked Loyola of Chicago team in Durham the day after Loyola nipped North Carolina by one point in Chapel Hill. By this time, basketball had become so popular on the public school level that Durham High School was fielding stronger teams than the YMCA. Cameron got a foothold on the local players and began signing a string of stars that helped build the Duke program into a regional powerhouse. The one Durham High player who got away from Cameron was a loquacious left-handed forward named Horace “Bones” McKinney, who went instead to N.C. State and, after serving in World War II, finished up his college career at UNC.
THE BASKETBALL EXPLOSION
In the 1920s and through the Depression years, basketball was just a minor part of the sports landscape. Football was the big sport and with the arrival of Wallace Wade at Duke, the Duke- UNC football game supplanted UNC-Virginia as the region's biggest annual sporting event.
Basketball was still secondary to baseball in the hearts and minds of Tobacco Road’s sporting public. The small gyms at UNC (the Tin Can) and at Duke could accommodate 3,000 or so fans, but usually drew less than a third of that. Compare that to the “massive” Duke Stadium for football, a center piece of the new West Campus where Wade won enough to first have his picture on the cover of Time Magazine and eventually have the horseshoe named after him.
The bloated Southern Conference split in 1932 along strictly geographic bounds — the 13 western schools forming the new Southeastern Conference, while the 10 schools on the Eastern Seaboard remained in the Southern Conference. Because of the split, the conference moved its championship game from Atlanta to Raleigh, where Memorial Auditorium offered a more-than- adequate 3,000 seats for the league’s postseason event.
UNC-Duke basketball continued in the shadow of a football rivalry that came to be more and more dominated by Wallace Wade’s juggernaut in Durham. Head to head, the two programs competed on fairly even terms in basketball, although Duke kept coming up frustratingly short in conference competition, while UNC cashed in on its opportunities.
The Blue Devils, losers in the 1929 and 1930 finals in Atlanta, also lost in the championship game of the first two Southern Conference Tournaments played in Raleigh — the 1934 loss a one-point heartbreaker to Washington & Lee. Carolina would beat W&L in the 1935 and ’36 finals before the Generals — playing in their fourth straight Southern Conference title game, edged the White Phantoms (as UNC was being called in those days) for the 1937 title.
That game, played before some 2,000 fans in Raleigh, was to be the last played under the old rules that dictated a center-jump after every basket. The NCAA voted to eliminate the center-jump (except to open games and the second half) for the 1937-38 season.
That decision was to change the face of college basketball.
Fan interest exploded in 1938 in the wake of the NCAA rule change. That change would essentially create the modern game by allowing the up-and-down flow that characterizes basketball today. Adaptation to the new rule was sporadic—many schools were slow to realize the possibilities inherent in the new rule changes.
As it turned out, Durham somehow became one of the leaders in the exploitation of the new rules. The humble mill town — dominated by tobacco and textile manufactures — saw a remarkable synergy in the days just before World War II. A few miles from the Duke campus, young basketball genius John McLendon, a Kansas product who learned the game directly from James Naismith, joined the staff at the North Carolina College of Negroes (now North Carolina Central University) and began experimenting with a fast break offense and the full-court press on defense. Across town at the Durham YMCA, “Footsie” Knight began training a remarkable crop of young players in many of the same tactics. Several of Knight’s proteges took his innovations a few blocks across town to Durham High School, where under Coach Paul Sykes, they dazzled crowds with a brand of basketball unlike any ever seen before. That Durham High team would win 71 straight games over the next three years, winning tournaments as far away as Buffalo, N.Y., and Jacksonville, Fla.
Many of those Durham High stars would end up playing for Eddie Cameron at Duke. Yet, even before the arrival of the Knight/Sykes contingent, it became obvious that the Duke coach was aware of the revolution taking place in his hometown. The 1938 Duke team began the season with almost no expectations. Cameron told a local reporter that this would be his worst team ever. But as the Duke coach slowly and carefully integrated some of the innovations that McLendon and Knight were developing across town, Cameron’s Blue Devils began to attract attention.